This is an exceptionally well written piece, discussing the bias against atheists in the US. It’s not approaching it from the “atheists as victims ” angle, but rather just exposing current attitudes and their relationship to historical attitudes about other minorities. Good food for thought.
The author touches on the point that atheists are misunderstood. I think this is understated. In part it’s fueled by the reality that most people don’t know any atheists. (In reality, they probably do, but as the article states, many of them stay well closeted.) Much as gays, blacks, and other minorities required some everyday exposure to the population in general before they began to gain acceptance, the same is true of atheists.
But a larger difficulty is that while there is a natural attempt to define us, there is little cohesive about us. We are a very diverse group, only loosely held together by our lack of faith. It’s hard to define a group by the lack of something. It’s like trying to profile people who don’t drive SUVs. It might be because they are rabid tree-huggers, but it might be because they can’t afford one, don’t have a place to park it, or any of a dozen other reasons. There is no atheist culture. Because of that, I think it will be all the harder for people to know and accept us as a group.
Maybe the place to start is to accept us as individuals, including accepting and allowing us to openly assert our personal convictions. Maybe you could even ask us about our views of the world. Most of us are actually eager to share (not preach), but we don’t because it seems to make you so darned uncomfortable.
wah wah wah. The only people that are bigger morons than atheists are the born again wackos intent on “saving them”. Please somebody … tell me who gives a rats ass!
I think you’ve summed up the problem nicely. Let me check and see if we have an opening for a bigot poster child…
ah… that’s the answer! “Anyone who disagrees with me is a bigot”. Well done. As Jack Nicholson said in A Few Good Men, “You can’t handle the truth”.
You must be so f***ing confused with Clinton and Obama label boy … if you don’t vote for him – your a racist….if you don’t vote fer her – your a sexist! Screwed, glued and tattoo’d! Your ignorance comes back to bite your behind Roscoe!
Do you even bother to read what you write? It wasn’t that you disagreed with me, or even that you called me a moron (indirectly) that makes you a bigot. It’s that you classified all atheists as well as all proselytizing born agains as morons that makes you a bigot. The born agains might have a larger beef as you doubled up on them as “wackos” as well.
A bigot is defined as, “a person who is utterly intolerant of any differing creed, belief, or opinion.” I think the shoe fits you Cinderella. Time to suck it up and go to the Bigot Ball.
Further… to disagree with me, you’d have to first make a cogent point.
Let me repeat … wah wah wah. My God, you are such a wimpy victim! I have never known a man in more dire need of a testosterone injection in my life.
Here is the bottom line … EVERYONE faces some form of discrimination … but most of us suck it up and move on. But of course you whine incessantly on your blog about your victimhood. How about focusing on the good things in your life? Great kids … Beauty .. good job … instead of this whiny crap.
News flash …. No one here wants to know or cares about your little piece of the discrimination pie. Move on, will ya? Looking at you has become depressing and hilarious all at the same time for far too many of us.
Then again … keep it up. It has become quite a source of entertainment here at work ….
Note that discrimination is defined as, “treatment or consideration of, or making a distinction in favor of or against, a person or thing based on the group, class, or category to which that person or thing belongs rather than on individual merit: racial and religious intolerance and discrimination.”
I’ve never claimed to have been discriminated against. Apparently your experience is different, although I think you need to be careful to distinguish between things that happen to you because of classifications into which you fall (discrimination), and just bad things that happen to you. Just because you were passed over for promotion, doesn’t mean you were discriminated against. I would speculate that many people haven’t truly been discriminated against. Certainly not “everyone.”
I do feel that the intolerance the majority of the population shows towards atheists as a group is unhealthy – not just for atheists, but for society. Not because it impacts me personally, but because I want a better world for all our children to grow up in. A world that doesn’t cow-tow to the anti-intellectual xenophobic religiosity which has shadowed so much of our politics and our educational system over the past decade.
Frankly, it is people like you—people who think this is is no big deal—people essentially defending their bigotry—that are the root of the problem—that are the barriers to change. There have been people like that through the germination phases of every social rights movement in history. People who said the blacks were so much better off then when they were slaves, so why are they whining? People who said women have it so good at home, why are they bitching about equal opportunity in the workplace? This is no different. You are no different.
I have a voice and the courage to use it. I won’t apologize for that, nor am I remotely intimidated by your repeated attempts to quiesce me. Rather, I hope that it might inspire even one or two others to be less afraid of who and what they are. Or maybe it will help someone recognize an intolerance they were not even aware they had.
Or perhaps they will just be amused by the irony of you standing behind the veil of anonymity and accusing me of needing bigger balls.
This is not a hate speech or any attacks. It is my conclusion after seeing born agains in action and forcing their beliefs on the weak and naive. Lord knows when Christ was on this earth he did not practice this.
Born agains are freaks plain and simple.
They have been brainwashed to the point they will lie, cheat, and sneak to get what they want in business, with friends and family, and slaughter you with THEIR view of the Bible. They prey on the under educated (Africa is a favorite target), jail birds (meetings with those in jail), naive teens in their development stages of making informed judgments, and anyone else who is an easy target. They all hate Catholics…I’ve even read about a born again mission to Ireland to rescue women that were forced to be nuns! These people are wacked! In comparison they are as dangerous to a society as Hitler’s Gestapo was in Europe.
When you run into one, don’t be nice since that is one of their sneaky tactics and run as far way from them as you can. If you are in a store or in line to purchase something, drop it and tell the manager on your way out you don’t want to shop there because of born again freaks solicitation on their premise.
The born again club/society has gone far enough. God only speaks to BA’s, only BA’s will go to heaven, and on and on with their hypocrisy. Since they are brainwashed to the danger point, it is hard or impossible to stop them. Any engagement with them is usually fruitless because they are so clever and manipulative and have so many HIDDEN agendas. You can not trust them in any way, form shape, or matter. Period.